A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday. The items look like trash. They are not.
Both objects were aboard NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft in 1969, during humanity's first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. One was a problem that nearly left Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stranded on the lunar surface. The other was the fix. According to Ars Technica, the story behind the auction is one of the most remarkable moments of improvisation in the history of spaceflight.
The problem started when Aldrin noticed that the top of a circuit breaker switch had snapped off. That switch was critical. It would enable the ascent engine to ignite and begin the crew's trip back to Earth. Without it working, Armstrong and Aldrin were not going home.
Aldrin radioed Mission Control with the news. "Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?" he said. "The reason I'm asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off. I think we can push it back in again. I'm not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though."
Engineers on the ground began working out a backup plan. But Aldrin found a simpler one first. He had a plastic felt-tip pen in one of his suit pockets.
He explained the decision in a letter that accompanied the artifacts at auction. "While I could have stuck my finger in and reset the switch, there was electricity flowing through the breaker and I did not want to electrocute myself. I had a plastic felt tip pen in one of my suit pockets and it fit into the breaker opening, so I pushed the marker pen into the circuit breaker, it clicked on, and we rearmed the Engine Arm circuit," he wrote.
"Now we could leave the lunar surface," Aldrin said, "rendezvous with Mike Collins in the command module, and head for home. Disaster averted."
The pen Aldrin used was a Duro-brand Rocket felt-tip marker, not a Fisher Space Pen. That detail matters. For years, Fisher Space Pen included a version of the circuit breaker story in the pamphlet packaged with every pen it sold. Aldrin eventually pushed back, pointing out that as an engineer, he would never insert a metal-tipped writing instrument into a live electrical socket. The Duro marker had a plastic tip, which made it safe to use.
The auction took place 57 years after the Apollo 11 mission. Both the pen and the broken circuit breaker switch were sold together, drawing the highest bids of the sale. Their combined price of $857,600 reflects not just their age or rarity, but the specific moment they represent: a quick decision inside a lunar module, on the surface of the Moon, with no room for error.
